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1 week ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
There are about a million fly rods on the market. When you’re just getting into this sport, picking beginner fly rods can make you feel like you’re a plumber who just got asked to judge a dance competition. You can certainly get lost in the weeds when it comes to fly rods, but the good news is that the beginner fly rod market has never been more robust than it is now.
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1 week ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
Skwala, a leading brand in wading and technical apparel, just announced the addition of two new products to their lineup. The RS Boot and Carbon Boot are the company’s first foray into footwear. “We don’t build gear that’s ‘good, better, best,'” Rich Hohne, Chief Marketing Officer for Skwala, said. “We build things based on end-use. The Carbon wader, for example, is the best wader for cold-water, warm-air environment. The RS (wader) is the best for the steelheader battling those conditions.
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1 week ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
Some folks might disagree with me on this point, but one of fly fishing’s best attributes is that it has no real rules. Your job is to put a fly in front of a fish, and make that fly look real. How you accomplish that is up to you. Your casting form doesn’t mater, the length of your leader is meaningless, and your fly choice won’t amount to anything if you can’t put that fly in front of a fish, and make it look real.
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2 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
Simms has launched their newest wading jacket, the Vapor Elite. Simms bills this jacket as “the ultimate packable rainwear solution.” It’s built with stretch and movement in mind, so it shouldn’t feel like a stiff, inflexible piece of gear like so many other rain jackets do. The packable claim looks legit, as you can see in this photo: It packs into its own chest pocket, so it should easily fit in a sling pack, backpack, or even a vest, if you end up not needing it.
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2 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
The United States Congress is currently hammering out a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. As part of that budget, a proposal was made by two senators to entirely block the sale of public lands. There has been talk recently of some congressional representatives who are open to the idea of selling off federal lands to help with the housing problems facing the West.
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2 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
A few weeks ago, I fished my first good dry fly hatch of the year. Small blue-winged olives were coming off in enough numbers that every trout in the river was looking up, at least for a couple of hours. This would’ve been in late March, so I’d spent the previous four months chucking heavy nymph rigs on large tailwaters, the only rivers that fish year-round here in my neck of the woods.
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3 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
One of the country’s first fly fishing writers, and an influential figure in fly fishing history, was a woman born in 1854 in Phillips, Maine. Cornelia Thurza Crosby eventually became known as “Fly Rod Crosby,” a nickname I reckon a few anglers today would love to go by. Crosby had a tough childhood, like most did in the 19th century. Her family lived just south of the Rangeley Lakes region in Maine, and her father died when she was young.
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3 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
Chase and Aimee Bartee are an incredibly talented filmmaking duo. Their current passion project is a series called “For Wild’s Sake” which tells important ecological stories in a compelling fashion. The series features previous installments about the Bartee’s attempts to catch arctic char in Maine, Apache trout in Arizona, and other rare trout species in California. The films are beautifully made, and as an added bonus, you get to see some of Chase’s artwork along the way.
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3 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
I saw a brown trout rise to eat a blue-winged olive in a riffle, and I immediately set the camera down. I was on the water to shoot some content for an upcoming video, but work has to take a backseat to fishing sometimes. I’d expected a hatch when Alex and I stepped out of the truck and into a 70-degree day with no wind. But it was still early enough in the year that the hatch would likely come off in fits and starts, and the fish wouldn’t take much notice.
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4 weeks ago | 
flylordsmag.com | Spencer Durrant
Louis Cahill thought he’d bought his final house, his getaway in the mountains where he’d be free to fish for trout to his heart’s content. Like everyone else in northwest North Carolina, though, he had no idea of the tragedy that awaited. “I’ve been in several war zones. They’re not anything like [North Carolina after Hurricane Helene], unless you’re right where some really big munitions have been deployed,” Cahill told me. “Life kinda goes in a war.
